Thinking of upgrading my tivohd to a roamio but I have a lot of shows on my connected external drive that I don't want to lose. I'm assuming I'll loose everything if I connect it to the new roamio correct??

Yes, all shows are encrypted with a key unique to each TiVo. However, if you can transfer your shows between TiVos or to a PC (your cable company didn't turn on copy protection for those shows) then you can save them.

Thinking of upgrading my tivohd to a roamio but I have a lot of shows on my connected external drive that I don't want to lose. I'm assuming I'll loose everything if I connect it to the new roamio correct??

It's not so much that the shows are encrypted or encoded specifically to that TiVo, since you can copy them to a PC (and back to that TiVo or another one on your same account) if the cable company hasn't set the anti-copy bit, but, when you add an external to a TiVo, every show recorded after that is put partially on the internal hard drive and partially on the external drive, so the failure of either drive, or the removal of the external, costs you all of those shows.

Transfers will be slow from the TiVoHD no matter what. Just use TiVo Desktop or KMTTG
and use the PC to pull them to the PC. Then after several days depending on how much you need to transfer they will be on your PC hard drive. When transferring them from the PC to the Roamio, the transfer rates will be much faster.

1. Tuner Parking: Tune all the tuners to completely non-existent channels (don't use ones that exist, but you just don't have access to, like premiums).

Edit/Add: You can also just disconnect your Coax-in, to the TiVos, and get the same (if not better) effect. IIRC, the results are improved more this way, even more so if the CableCard is also removed.

2. Put the older TiVo(s) into standby mode while the content is being transferred off.

KMTTG has an option built-in to automatically park the tuners during transfers initiated by KMTTG. It can also park them manually by using the "test" button on each TiVo you want parked. It's limited to parking two tuner, though, either way that you set/use it in KMTTG.

The way this works is by stopping Live TV buffering (the tuner parking), and by shutting down all A/V outputs (standby), giving the shared resources of the central processor more to allocate to the networking processes and the transfer-related re-encoding processes.

On a TiVoHD, the difference is night and day. On a Premiere, it still helps, but sometimes may only add an extra 10Mbit/sec to the speed, as opposed to sometimes doubling the transfer speed of a TiVoHD.

Summary: Nothing to lose, and great potential on what can be gained, by doing these two things.

Note: If you don't need the old TiVo(s) to continue recording anything (during the transfers), and still have Season Passes, ARWL Wishlists, or any manual recordings scheduled, you should eliminate them from the ToDo list, to keep the tuners parked.

KMTTG also can back up your Season Passes, and allows you to restore them to any TiVo, in the order they are in. TiVo's online manager for this will often randomly re-organize the SP ordering, and will often drop SPs that don't have any episodes currently in the current guide data. So, I recommend KMTTG, and avoiding the TiVo website-based method (which also tends to corrupt your SPs).

It doesn't matter what you do with the TiVo HD. Transfers will just be slow and slower. Either way they are excruciatingly slow. I know I can't stand dealing with them on my GFs S3 boxes.

It does matter what they do. If they are determined to offload or move content, at least I gave some valid and proven methods to get the most speed possible. I know, all too well, how hard it is (due to the amount of time it takes) to get any significant amount of content off a TiVo HD, or even a Premiere. When I sold my last Premiere, I had to give-up and ship it, without getting my recordings off. Now, I find the only way I'll likely ever be able to watch them is to pay for a rental, or buy a copy, due to some things just never finding their way onto Hulu, Hulu Plus, or Netflix. The cost of doing so would easily exceed what I sold the Premiere w/LTS for (maybe even in multiples of).

The difference between doing nothing, and doing two things, to improve the speed, is significant. If the old TiVo HD doesn't need to be buffering/recording and out of standby, there's nothing to be lost by using my suggestions.

Even the Base Roamio is only a 100Mbit connection (as is the TiVo HD). The difference is the Roamio can get close to full-speed, without taking any measures, due to the extra processing power. The previous models started off with barely enough power, which ultimately lowered what could be devoted to the networking and encoding on-the-fly, unless methods were used to free up processing time/cycles.

It does matter what they do. If they are determined to offload or move content, at least I gave some valid and proven methods to get the most speed possible. I know, all too well, how hard it is (due to the amount of time it takes) to get any significant amount of content off a TiVo HD, or even a Premiere. When I sold my last Premiere, I had to give-up and ship it, without getting my recordings off. Now, I find the only way I'll likely ever be able to watch them is to pay for a rental, or buy a copy, due to some things just never finding their way onto Hulu, Hulu Plus, or Netflix. The cost of doing so would easily exceed what I sold the Premiere w/LTS for (maybe even in multiples of).

The difference between doing nothing, and doing two things, to improve the speed, is significant. If the old TiVo HD doesn't need to be buffering/recording and out of standby, there's nothing to be lost by using my suggestions.

Even the Base Roamio is only a 100Mbit connection (as is the TiVo HD). The difference is the Roamio can get close to full-speed, without taking any measures, due to the extra processing power. The previous models started off with barely enough power, which ultimately lowered what could be devoted to the networking and encoding on-the-fly, unless methods were used to free up processing time/cycles.

Even my two tuner Premiere gets 70Mb/s to 80Mb/s transfer rates. It's pretty quick. But the TiVoHD is dirt slow. It's even slower than my GFs S3 boxes if I remember correctly. Of course every little bit of speed helps. But I think the easiest thing is just to select your transfers to a PC and then just let them transfer over several days no matter what the speed. Then at some point later, when you come back to the PC, all the transfers will be done.

And ever since the last software update my Roamio Pro transfer speeds have been like my Roamio Basic transfer speeds. It's almost as if it's internally limited to a 100BT connection now instead of using the GigE connection.